5 finance workflows you should automate first

Finance teams waste significant time on repetitive tasks that automations could handle more accurately and faster. But what should you automate first? Let’s look at five processes that you could automate with Reiterate OS to quickly feel the impact.

Data centralization

Your finance data lives in your PSPs, billing system, CRM, ERP, and spreadsheets, which creates a fragmented view of all your operations. Without a central platform connecting these systems, your team manually transfers data between tools, reconciles discrepancies, and maintains multiple versions of the same information. This can cause errors and make the month-end close unnecessarily complex and time-consuming.

Centralizing your financial data should be the first priority. Every other task depends on getting correct information quickly. A centralized platform connects directly to your payment processors, banks, and business systems. So, when a payment processes, it automatically flows to your ERP, updates your CRM, and refreshes your dashboards without manual intervention.

Bank reconciliation

Matching bank statements to accounting records involves downloading statements from multiple banks, comparing each transaction to your books, and investigating discrepancies. It’s a process that becomes exponentially more complex when you're handling multiple currencies and accounts. A manual approach can create a lag where you're making decisions based on month-old data while transactions are happening in real-time.

In order to avoid duplicate entries, missed transactions, and incorrect currency conversions, it’s worth automating bank reconciliation. For example, you could set up a workflow that automatically pulls data from bank accounts, matches the transactions to your ledger using rule-based logic, and flags any discrepancies for review.

An automated bank reconciliation workflow can save you hours if not days of work, depending on how many currencies and banks your setup includes. And you’ll get to make financial decisions based on near-real-time cash positions not month-old data.

Purchase order processing

Email-based purchase order processing is bound to create delays. Requests can get stuck in someone's inbox and the approvers might be out of office. At month-end, you might discover surprises that could have been anticipated.

With automated purchase order processing, your system matches new invoices to open purchase orders and receiving records as soon as they arrive without manual intervention. If the invoice passes the matching rules without discrepancies, it can be automatically approved and pushed into payment processing. You’ll only have to deal with invoices that don’t pass the matching rules. That way, you won’t have to worry about your workload growing as your operations expand.

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Customer invoice generation

Late invoicing directly impacts cash flow, yet many finance teams still create invoices manually from contracts, sales orders, or spreadsheets. This manual approach can cause pricing mistakes, incorrect tax calculations, and missing purchase order numbers, which delays payment while customers request corrections. For subscription businesses and usage-based pricing models, manual invoicing becomes nearly impossible at scale.

Instead, you should set up an invoice generation workflow that generates invoices directly from trigger events such as order fulfillment, subscription renewals, or usage threshold milestones. Invoices would be created automatically based on pricing terms for each customer and you would get notified of any anomalies, like extremely high usage or pricing term mismatches. Without having to apply special terms to every customer, your invoices can go out on the same day rather than days or weeks later.

Payment reconciliation

High-transaction businesses face impossible manual workloads when processing payments that come in through credit cards, bank transfers, payment processors, and digital wallets. Processing 1000 payments daily means matching 1000 line items to invoices while accounting for fees, currency differences, and timing gaps. Heavy workloads often result in unmatched payments, duplicate entries, and lost revenue.

An automated payment reconciliation workflow connects directly to payment processors and bank accounts and matches incoming payments to open invoices using customer identifiers, invoice numbers, and amount logic. It automates handling PSP fees, transactions split across multiple invoices, and flags variances that exceed tolerance thresholds. Instead of manually reviewing every transaction, you would only need to deal with the exceptions flagged by the system.

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In order to start saving time on financial processes fast, you should start with workflows with high transaction volumes, frequent errors, or critical timing dependencies. If you don’t yet have an automation tool set up, contact us and we’ll show how Reiterate OS can help you out.

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